During the pandemic, The Great British Baking Show became in millions of homes, including mine, literal and figurative comfort food. Its contestants—gathered under a (literal and figurative) big tent—are eliminated one by one, week by week, in as genial and good-natured a format as exists anywhere on television. As my colleague TIME TV critic Judy Berman has written, binging old seasons of the show “practically qualified as therapy” during lockdown. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] This year, the show enters its 14th season, maturing but somewhat miraculously maintaining itself as an alternative to cattier, more intense, eat-or-be-eaten reality shows.